The Nolan family’s New Millennium Reunion could have been held in a phone
booth. Despite years of planning, only two of the several dozen living
descendants of Lewis Elmer Nolan and Bertha Orpha Miller Nolan made the trip to
Cass Lake, Minn., to observe what would have been the Centennial year of the
long-dead couple’s wedding anniversary.

Nonetheless, the two of us who did
show up– me, Lewis Earle “Buzz”
Nolan of Memphis, Tenn., and James “Jim” Lewis Connor MD, of Lincoln, Neb. – had
a great time. And what we lacked in numbers we compensated for in depth of
interest and freshly awakened understanding of the lives lived by our

grandparents. Both Jim and I are namesakes of our grandfather. The name “Lewis”
was also carried by my late father, Lewis Earle Nolan, MD, and still echoes down
the generations.

Jim and I were accompanied on our
pilgrimage to Cass Lake in the summer of 2000 by our wives. My wife of 32 years
is Betty Trapp Nolan, a high school teacher in Memphis. Jim's wife of 29 years
is Carol Jane Tennant Connor, director of public libraries in Lincoln. Mary
Nolan Ballard, now 69, of St. Petersburg, Fla., my half-sister and the eldest
living grandchild of L.E. and Bertha, had very much wanted to join us in Cass
Lake. But poor health prevented her from making the trip.

We three are among the 14
grandchildren of Lewis Elmer (L.E.) and Bertha whose identities I know. My late
father was Lewis Earle Nolan, MD, who had a roving eye. His five marriages and
other possible relationships raise the possibility that L.E. and Bertha had more
than the 14 grandchildren I know about. I’ve been told about the existence of
yet another family headed by my father (this family supposedly lived in Chicago
long before he married my mother), but the details have been withheld at the
request of the supposed children and I have yet to come across any confirming
documentation.

Lewis Elmer (known as “L.E.”) Nolan was the youngest son of Civil War
veteran and Irish immigrant John Nolan and Bridget Reynolds Nolan of Ridgeville
Township, Wis. His bride was Bertha Orpha Miller, the youngest daughter of Dr.
Haschall Phelps Miller and Orpha Hinman Miller of nearby Norwalk, Wis.. The
couple married April 12, 1900, in Tomah, Wis.

According to their nephew, the
late Donovan Nolan of nearby LaCrosse, Wis., the ceremony was a double wedding
that also married his parents, Levi “Lee” Nolan and Mamie McGary. The four
members of the wedding party were all residents of Monroe County. The county in
Southwest Wisconsin was the site of the John Nolan farm in Ridgeville and also
the town of Norfolk, where Bertha’s father practiced medicine.

As detailed in my book, “Nolan-Miller Family History” published by
Highland Press in 1997, L.E. Nolan was a railroad man his entire working life. A
summary of his life and that of his wife, Bertha, is posted on a sister website
at lewis_nolan/LE.HTML.

L. E. Nolan was born March 4, 1870
in Ridgeville and worked as a telegrapher in several depots operated by the

Great Northern and Soo Line railroads in Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin.
He was transferred to Cass Lake by the Soo Line in 1914, where he became station
agent. He lived and worked there until his death April 28, 1939, at the age of
69.

Bertha’s primary residence
continued to be Cass Lake until her death Feb. 23, 1959, at an age variously put
at 77, 81, 85 or somewhere in between.

I hadn’t visited Cass Lake in more
than 40 years. My last visit came in 1957, when I was 15. My father drove me
there from Hancock, Mich., after his fourth wife –Dorothy Rae Smith Nolan - kicked me out
of their palatial home in the middle of my sophomore year of high school. My
memory of the visit to Cass Lake is sketchy, but I do recall spending the night
in Grandmother Bertha's two-story, wooden house and being taken to the cemetery
to visit the graves of my grandfather and one of his children. I was then put on
a train to Sacramento, where I rejoined my mother and two brothers, ending a
stormy stay of six months with my father and his wife du jour.

My cousin Jim likewise hadn’t been
in Cass Lake in 18 years. But I soon found that his memory of the place where he
spent much of his boyhood is sharp. Jim served as our tour guide, local
historian and chief conductor of our trip down memory lane. He and Carol were
also our charming luncheon and dinner companions during our four days in Cass
Lake.

As with other trips recounted in
“Nolan-Miller Family History,” I kept a travel journal to record my impressions
and thoughts about the places visited. I especially wanted to be the “eyes and
ears” for Mary Nolan Ballard, who has made so very many contributions to keeping
our family history alive and well documented. The following journal is dedicated
to Mary, whom I hope is one day able to travel to Cass Lake to pay homage to the
memories of our grandparents and to deepen her appreciation and fascination with
the history of the Nolans, Millers and related families.

Tuesday, June 27, 2000 – Memphis to Minneapolis

After seven years of talking it up and trying to plan
a family reunion in Cass Lake as a follow-up to our 1993 gathering in Monroe
County, Wis., I arose just before 3 a.m. this morning to get ready for the
journey. Betty and I had booked a 5:20 a.m. Delta flight from Memphis to
Minneapolis, connecting through Atlanta. It was definitely a round-about way to
get to Minnesota from our home in Memphis, but the inconvenience was offset by a
cheap fare, roughly half what the direct Northwest flight costs.

Betty and I had first planned to
drive, thinking that we’d take a few days on either side of the Cass Lake
gathering to visit St. Louis, Chicago and perhaps a few places inWisconsin. However, no interest in a
reunion event in Monroe County ever emerged, so we decided to eliminate the side
trips and about four days of driving. I was surprised and disappointed at the
lack of interest since about 30 descendants of L.E.’s brother, Lee Nolan, lived
in or near Monroe County and had participated in our 1993 gathering. Moreover,
the timing of our 2000 gathering was driven by the 100th
anniversaries of the double weddings.

I really can’t fault the Wisconsin
Nolans or any other branch of the family for not participating in the 2000
event; the lack of enthusiasm for family history is widespread in our bunch.
Other than a few spots of lukewarm interest here and there, there are only a
very few of us who seem to care passionately about the family history. Mary (a
devout Morman) is the one who carries the largest banner in our tiny parade.
I’ve found that relatives generally tend to ignore or humor me when I bring up
the subject of genealogy. However, I understand that is not unusual since the
norm seems to be one genealogist per family.

The flight to Minneapolis was the
best kind, uneventful. Because of horrendous delays with baggage on our last
Delta flight, Betty and I traveled light and carried our bags on the plane. We
arrived just after 10 a.m. and were greeted by a large terminal expansion
construction project, which had us lugging and tugging our bags through what
seemed like a mile of maze-like, temporary passageways to the Avis counter. Our
rental car for the 245-mile drive north to Cass Lake was a full-size, Chevrolet
Lumina.

Minneapolis was where my late
father, Lewis Earle Nolan, MD, received his college degrees and worked early in
his medical career. His eyesight kept him from accepting an appointment to the
U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Consequently, he entered the University of
Minnesota in 1920 and the university’s medical school in 1922, where he obtained
scholarships, his BS degree in 1925 and his doctor of medicine degree in 1927.

Lewis lived for a time in a
boarding house near the campus while going to college. He used his father’s
railroad pass for frequent trips home to Cass Lake. He also shipped his laundry
home via rail to be washed, probably a benefit of having a station agent for a
father and a doting mother who helped him pinch pennies.

My father practiced medicine in
Duluth for a time and returned to Minneapolis in 1930, where he studied
pathology at the University of Minnesota and worked as a pathology assistant and
instructor until 1939. By this time he had married for the second time, to
Louise Abigail Stephenson, a nurse he had met at the Duluth hospital where both
worked.His first wife, Viola
Evelyn Nelson, left him; there were no children from that marriage, according to
his late brother, Donald Edwin Nolan, MD, also a Minnesota graduate.

Betty and I drove by the main
campus of the University of Minnesota, long renowned for its medical school and
affiliation with the Mayo Clinic of Rochester, Minn. But we didn’t stop there or
even at the world’s largest indoor shopping mall just outside of town. Our time
was limited and the focus of this trip was on Cass Lake.

Our only stop in Minneapolis was
for a short detour to the midtown neighborhood where my father and Louise

Stephenson Nolan lived with their children. Their eldest living child, my
half-sister Mary Nolan Ballard, had asked us to take some photos of her former
home and I was happy to oblige. She made it easy to find the house by providing
specific driving instructions, courtesy of an Internet map site.

The Nolans lived in a two-story
Tudor house that still stands at 5015 13th Avenue. It is in a
charming, settled neighborhood not far from downtown. The home is near several
parks and a golf course. Mary lived there until 1939, when the family moved to
Oak Park, Ill., near Chicago, following transfer of Lewis to the Hinds Veterans
Administration Hospital.

Louise unilaterally moved herself
and three living children to St. Petersburg, Fla., in February, 1940, where
Louise lived until her death in 1988. Louise had insisted on escaping from the
Northern winters after she came down with pneumonia. Lewis stayed behind and
eventually relocated to West Virginia, where he met my mother, Garnett Elizabeth
Ford. She became his third wife in 1942.

Mary was 7 years old at the time
her mother packed her, brother James, 6,and sister Abigail, 15 months, off to St. Petersburg. But Mary well
remembers her life in Minneapolis with fondness and recalls the names of her
neighborhood playmates (her best friends were Peggy Twomey and Donna
Nystrom).

Ironically, there was a
resemblance between the Minneapolis house - made of brick with stucco and
exposed timbers in the Tudor manner - to my mother's house at 1517
41st Street in Sacramento, where I did most of my growing up. The two
houses are in established neighborhoods and are of the same architectural style.
The similarity is not exact but it is close enough to make me wonder whether my
father had chosen both homes or whether his second and third wives (respectively
Louise Stephenson and Garnett Ford), had similar tastes. After all, they married
the same man. And both had studied nursing. And both liked warm climates.